Law that divides husband and wife

by Meron Rapoport

MURAD al-Sana, an Arab Israeli lawyer, is frightened because a new law forbids him to live with his wife Abir. He is from the Bedouin town of Laskia, near Beersheba, in Israel. Politics was the last thing on his mind when he met Abir, a Palestinian from Bethlehem on a special peace-building programme in Middle Eastern studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. They fell in love. Neither could see any reason why anything should come between them. “I knew Abir was not a criminal, and I wasn’t either,” says Murad. “I didn’t even think about her being Palestinian and me Israeli. I loved her and that was it.”

In February 2003, three years after meeting in Canada, they married in Jerusalem. Murad had become a lawyer and Abir a university lecturer. But on 12 May the Israeli government decided that Palestinian spouses of Israel’s Arab citizens should no longer have the right to live in Israel. The law was passed by the Knesset two months later.

Abir, who had moved to Beersheba to live with her husband, suddenly found herself an illegal immigrant in her own home. “That was the worst moment of our lives,” says Murad. “The threat of arrest hung over our heads like a sword.” Abir couldn’t go to teach at the university in Jerusalem, or get proper healthcare. “We couldn’t give anyone our address, for fear that the police might find us.”

The legislation that turned the al-Sana family life into a nightmare is the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. The international community, including the European Commission, has denounced it as racist and discriminatory. It denies a fundamental human right: the right to love where you want and raise a family. Israel’s response to the criticism is that it has had to sacrifice this basic right for the sake of national security. Few outside Israel believe this. Even in Israel many are opposed to the law.

Marriages between Palestinians with Israeli citizenship (Israeli Arabs) and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza have been common for years. They share the same culture and often the same family roots, an important advantage since in Palestine it is traditional to marry within one’s own clan. Until last year a Palestinian marrying an Israeli could obtain a permanent residence permit, if not full Israeli citizenship, although the bureaucratic procedure was far longer than that required of any other foreign nationals marrying Israelis.

From 1993 to 2001 the Israeli interior ministry registered 22,414 requests for family reunification and accepted 16,007. There are no official statistics on the numbers of children, but estimates suggest at least 100,000 Pales tinians were granted permission to live in Israel this way. In a country of just 6 million people this is a significant number.

The new law represents a major and harsh policy shift. It states: “The interior ministry will not grant citizenship to an inhabitant of the area” - defined as Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and the Gaza Strip. Israeli settlers are exempt. They belong to a more exclusive category - “inhabitant of an Israeli settlement in the area”.

The law means that the ministry or the military cannot grant Israeli residence to Palestinians from the occupied territories. So Abir al-Sana and thousands of other Palestinians now have no hope of uniting their families legally. Her children and thousands of others will grow up either away from one parent or in fear of the law.

There are only two exceptions: for people coming to Israel temporarily, to work or receive medical treatment; or for any inhabitant of an area whom the minister or area commander “is convinced . . . identifies with the state of Israel and its goals” and has “performed a significant act to promote the security, economy or some other important matter of the state”. So Palestinian collaborators will be granted Israeli citizenship.

The official justification for this law is that it fulfils security imperatives. The explanatory notes claim that Palestinians who obtained their Israeli papers through family reunification were “actively engaged in the conflict”, so this means of access to the country must be blocked. Questioned by Adalah, a legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, the government cited six cases of naturalised Palestinians taking part in terrorist activities. Later the number quoted rose to 21. This figure, Adalah replied, represents 0.02% of Palestinians admitted under the old laws. It is significantly lower than the number of relatives of Palestinian collaborators who have been implicated in terrorist attacks. The man who drove a suicide bomber to Maxim’s restaurant in Haifa, where 23 people were killed on 3 October2003, was the son of a collaborator.

The real reason for this law is different: Israel’s fear of the demographic threat. Gideon Ezra, minister without portfolio and a former deputy head of the domestic security service (Shin Bet) openly admitted this before it was passed: “The state of Israel is not prepared to accept a creeping right of return; no one wants our state to cease to be a Jewish state.”

To avoid this, Israel is prepared to deny people the fundamental right to fall in love and raise a family. People are already suffering the consequences. Mahmud Salwe has only left Um Ghani, the village near Afula in northern Israel where he lives, twice. He is too scared of being separated from his wife and two children. A client of Yoahana Lerman, a lawyer who deals in these issues, had an abortion rather than risk having a child without legal rights.

“I can’t bear to imagine what will happen if this law is not changed,” says al-Sana, who also works at the Adalah centre. “It will be a disaster.” Adalah, with other organisations, petitioned the Supreme Court demanding that the law be cancelled on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and contravenes human rights. In a sign that it takes the issue seriously, the court has agreed to debate it with a quorum of 13 judges. “Love between human beings does not recognise ethnic borders,” says Adalah’s petition. “It disdains such borders. This attempt by the law will not succeed. Men and women will continue to fall in love, marry, and build a family.”

Israel often asks its Arab citizens not to make war. But can it also ask them not to make love?